Rolling Installation of Service Packs … Huzzah!

Our kind friends at Microsoft get beaten up pretty badly if they ever mess up. But this is the opposite kind of post from that!

This week I had to install 2008 SP2 on a collection of four servers (two failover clusters with mirroring between them, in two data centers). The need came up rather unexpectedly, and the machines needed to be patched, like, right now. I am so happy to report that I was able to do a rolling upgrade with minimal downtime across all four machines – and it was easy, and went flawlessly.

So, THANK YOU Microsoft engineers, Windows Server and SQL Server teams for making this possible. You rock.

Now, my Oracle buddies kid me that all it takes to be a SQL Server DBA is the ability to click “Next.” I am starting to worry a little …